New on Desk #57 — Off-Genre in Greyhawk

Typical week. Christmassy Lapfantasy keeps appropriating my writing time, but its time is swiftly running out. Wasting inordinate amounts of time playing Slay and reading A Practical Guide to Evil. That, too, will pass in time.

Literary genre in D&D

My D&D is deeply anti-dramatic, meaning that it’s not about story structures. Stories are created by any and all human experience, of course, but the game is not structured towards creating story arcs or protagonism or themes. There are other roleplaying games that are deeply and fundamentally dramatic, but D&D is not. Proper D&D takes your preconceptions of what the story is supposed to be, and replaces it with soulless dice rolls that kill dreams.

Despite this, we can still discuss genre tropification in D&D; as all cultural artifacts do, instances of play and game texts will still fall into genres, cultural historical categories. By and large the category for mainstream D&D is always and forever “dungeon fantasy”, where adventures go into humanoid-infested dungeons to make war and claim loot.

There’s been some thrust in D&D’s history towards other genres, with distinctly different tropes. Empire of the Petal Throne is an impressive thing in this regard, as it draws D&D away from dungeon fantasy and more towards Orientalist pulp adventure. (Arguably only D&D because that was the only game in town at the time, though; I’m not convinced its heart is in it.) Inhouse TSR attempts were always weak at best, with no real teeth, going into the realm of ludicrous try-hard over time; whether Ravenloft for horror or Dark Sun for pulp or Spacejammer for space opera, the products range from superficial to detached. By this time genuine development in what D&D-in-different-genre could be had practically stopped because the core activity development had stopped; D&D was what it was, and what it was was elfdwarf fantasy porridge, so no trying to override that with serious attempts at other genres. Really, this stuff smacks outright dumb today from an outsider perspective — why exactly do you feel the need to force elves and +1 swords to be a thing in your gothic horror campaign…

You might wish to consider the idea of D&D’s genre against the context of what I wrote last year about the adventure frameworks used in the game. These are overlapping approaches towards a similar thing, but they are not the same. When I say that D&D is almost always dungeoneering fantasy, what I’m saying is that it’s almost always about human-goblin relations instead of say Protestant-Catholic relations (a historical adventuring trope). You could switch genres (from fantasy race war to historical religious war, say) without switching away from the dungeoncrawl adventure model, to an extent. It would be another axis of possibilities.

So anyway, while I consider orthodox mainstream D&D a great disappointment when it comes to offering a rich and varied literary experience, the latter days old school renaissance of independent publishing has proven delightful in this exact way: people have been doing a lot of successful experimentation on the genre circumstances of D&D. Like, arbitrarily, consider Backswords & Bucklers, an entirely legit D&D campaign premise set in renaissance-era England. Apparently an impossible thing for TSR to ever achieve (official D&D has yet to support a campaign setting that does not feature halflings, unless you count a few fringe products from the late ’90s), yet completely natural here. And there are dozens of these projects out there, people just doing their own D&D in a variety of adventurous genres ranging from superheroes to science fiction and everything in between. For some wondrously strange reason independent authors not working for a soulless corporation seem to be able to create D&D settings that are not merely rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. (Greyhawk is the Titanic in this simile. TSR — and now WotC — published all this setting stuff that only ever amounted to rearranging the furniture. I suppose, if forced to elaborate, that the artistically inauthentic corporate culture at TSR would be the iceberg.)

In summary: I don’t hate dungeon fantasy, I guess, but I am very happy with how you can get all kinds of fun off-genre D&D stuff today. The low-hanging fruit is wonderful when people can just do, you know, real gothic horror or or space opera or fairy tale fantasy D&D without having to have the Gygaxian elfdwarf soup constantly simmering in the background. I would be both enticed and horrified by the opportunity to spy on the creative process that took TSR from its origins to a place where it made sense to do something like Al-Qadim.

Now, let’s take this observation back to practical matters: we had a very off-genre week in the Coup campaign! I’ll get into the details shortly, but both campaign forks just happened to do a quick and amusing drift towards the horror genre this week, independent of each other. Variety is the spice of life, and long campaigns like this are far too expansive to not make the occasional stylistic side trek. I wonder if this is the creative origin of TSR’s “everything comes with a side of elfdwarf” creative policy: you play the game, and it’s set in Gary’s dungeon fantasy world, and over time you do some little side-steps into other genres. So when it comes time to write some material for a different genre, you just model it on that one time when the elfdwarf game accidentally went scifi for one session.

Monday: Coup de Main #32

The party was traversing through Mistmarsh, on the way to seek some abandoned dwarven mine that surely isn’t full of goblins. (We’re in the Greyhawk setting, and the genre of dungeon fantasy is stronk!) Waylost the party Ranger has been the clear MVP throughout the arduous journey, what with navigation skills, camp-making skills, monster avoidance skills. This time Waylost saved the crew in a very dramatic way, though: he noticed an on-coming storm and, while looking for shelter, accidentally found a cave very well suited to sheltering a party of travelers. Good thing too, as the rain soon started pouring down in a way that’d make travel by pram in the swamp waterways difficult.

The cave itself proved (through a random process) to be a prepared ranger shelter set up in the past by some conscientious members of the fellowship. It was not an adventure cave, yet the adventurers nevertheless made sure to look for the secret door to underdark, because you never know. What was discovered was a peculiar cairn at the back of the cave, some ways from the entrance. The cairn was basically a rock pile with the skull of a bear on top. According to Waylost, acing his lore checks, the cairn probably wasn’t so much a burial site than a Ranger Circle equipment cache of some; possibly pretty old by the signs.

So Saad Maan the Fighter of course decides to open the cairn, and gets hit by the Ranger magic (Rangers are magic in Greyhawk) curse, gets shunted into a nightmare realm to fight the bear spirit in a duel. Waylost (MVP, remember) quickly figures out what happened and breaks the bear skull, saving Saad Maan from having to wrestle a 5 HD demon bear. Sorry, brown bear — but it was a creepy ghost.

All’s well that ends well; for all that Waylost gripes about stealing from the Circle, he doesn’t actually try to stop the party from taking the contents of the cache. Some bow-and-arrows stuff from way back, probably from the Migration Period wars between the Circle and the Suloise Empire.

But that’s just set dressing. The real adventure started afterwards. Amusingly coherent considering how this was all generated content; we just followed the process and kept our eyes open for the complications. And boy, was there complications.

The basic issue was that the weather didn’t want to let the party leave the cave! After two days of rain stopped, the actual storm was just getting going. It was a “windstorm”, with nice winds around 25‒30 m/s without much rain. Not that you need rain with that kind of wind, the water spray from the swamp waterways will do quite nicely. With the players joking about the flying ghouls in the random encounter table, it was pretty obvious that we’d stick to the cave until the weather allowed the expedition to continue. Sheltering in a less ideal location would actually been a very danger with weather like this.

(By the way: I do make fun of how one of the most intense chapters of the Greyhawk campaign set is the over-engineered weather simulation section. Yet here I am, routinely using the handy digital version as part of my sandboxing process. I have to admit that when you automate the crazy morass of nitty-picky tables, it does become something that I actually manage to use.)

After spending two days in the cave doing nothing except farting at each other, the party got to start rolling stress checks due to the constant and unfortunate howling of the winds. The cave wasn’t the most comfortable place to live in in the first place, and the cold and loud winds didn’t help, so it was a bit of a test of ascetic mettle all around. Not really high stakes per se, just one point of stress HP damage for failure. (Yeah, I run sanity rules, and it’s unified with HP – works great.) There was some attempt at social entertainments such as gambling, but what can you do; the PCs are so nasty they don’t much enjoy living together in close quarters.

It just happened to be the case that one of the responsible adults on the adventure, Gareva Goodenough, was a city boy, a Fighter with 1 HP to his name. While others failed that check and just lost a hit point, our boy Gareva started going a bit loopy. In the first instance when it happened a paladin the party had picked up on the way amusingly helped him recover his faculties with Lay on Hands, but basically that low HP score, combined with low WIS, made Gareva a bit of a ticking time bomb here in the windy cave.

The adventurers had the choice of alleviating their accumulating stress HP loss by “taking the blow”, which in the case of stress damage means adopting stress-relief methods such as fighting, fucking or otherwise. Like, say, religion. The party developed (admittedly inspired by the GM) a bit of a superstitious attitude towards the bear cairn they’d defiled: what if this weather wasn’t natural? What if the bear spirit was punishing them for breaking the skull? Waylost, ever the realist (and having a high WIS, as befits a Ranger), threw the skull remains out of the cave.

When the winds continued and Gareva dropped to zero HP again (and failed his save to keep it together), I was delighted to inform him that the bear skull Waylost threw out the day before had somehow found its way into Gareva’s pack. Clearly he’d gone out to collect it without anybody (including himself) noticing. Crazy, but crazier than a spontaneously teleporting bear skull?

The situation developed along these lines, with Gareva retreating to the back of the cave, finding religion, constructing a ritual mask for himself from the bear skull, determining that Saad Maan had to die under his sacrificial dagger — you know, the usual stuff. Not that the cave was easy for the rest of the good community of adventurers either, but Gareva was particularly inspired by the demon bear god over the week the party spent in the cave. Putting on the mask allowed him to reroll his hit die with a +2 bonus, in fact, which would surely come in handy. Just like a superhero (I mean a slasher), the mask grants him strength!

I’m sorry to say that Gareva failed in his ambush on Saad, which then led into a generally confused melee situation instead of the silent murder I was rooting for. However, then Gareva got a 4th order success on his mad rhetoric check, causing the single most serious social attack in the campaign so far: every party member who failed to resist got to either take 4 stress damage (save to mitigate) or adopt Gareva’s compelling belief that the only way for the storm to stop was to sacrifice Saad to the bear spirit. I think this “social combat” extension of the stress/sanity mechanics works nicely.

(Amusingly Saad himself was one of the party members on the line to take that 4 HP blow. He, of course, opted to believe that Gareva was correct in his wild yet oddly compelling ravings. Being an Evil character, Saad would certainly not let somebody sacrifice him just because that might save the rest of the party, so whether he believed Gareva or not didn’t matter for his strategic position of resisting the madman.)

This whole psychological horror boiler room situation was interesting (and this is actually what my ramblings about genre in D&D were about: genre largely defines the kinds of challenge in the game) in how ludicrous it was, and not necessarily very threatening in feel compared to say an angry band of goblins. Mathematically speaking the party got pretty close to the brink when Gareva started spewing his insane theology, though: he converted part of the party simply because they couldn’t take that 4 HP hit without going down, which led to a confused melee and wrestling match between more or less bloodthirsty party members. Had Gareva gotten off another successful rhetorical attack, he might have actually turned the party into bear cultism.

What ended up happening was, however, that the sanity party disarmed the self-described “bear club” and forced them to recant from their new religion. The bear mask was broken into pieces and scattered to the winds. And lo and behold, the next morning the winds were gone! One of the parts that I like the best about this adventure is that it was completely ambiguous for us (GM included) whether this was a supernatural encounter or not. The Ranger cairn was magical, sure, but what about the rest? Did Gareva go loco all on his own, or did the bear spirit possess the weak-minded fool?

Gareva himself survived the scenario, scarred but stronger for it: he has a “shaken mind” impairment (think “arrow in the knee”, except mental), but he also got to reroll his HP once more, ending up with a max HP of 7 instead of the 1 he started with. Broken once, this man would never go insane and try to murder his party-members again (we hope)!

Tuesday: Coup in Sunndi #7

Meanwhile (actually the next day) our face to face Coup continued in Iisalmi. To my delight the players opted to go for the Evil party that was speculated about earlier: Cultist and Warlock joined forces with Melchert the Evil Cleric, with the other players setting up a new band of ne’er-do-wells to bolster the ranks. Melchert as a 3rd level NPC “Master” has the arcane mastery to keep Cultist and Warlock wrapped around his little finger, and what’s even better, he has a Plan!

We geared up at start, of course, and set some ground rules for the new Evil party, the most important of which would be that everybody gains treasure shares equal to their Level (½ for 0-levelers). Evil! Plus, Melchert gets three shares because he’s 3rd level. Melchert also got to lay out his short and long term plans, and the players got to get a general feel for his “Cartoony Evil” Alignment approach. (He’s Chaotic Evil, just not Chaotic Stupid or Smart Evil, some of the other CE sub-Alignments we’ve seen). Cultist was immediately promoted to become the “Left Hand of Darkness” by the Master; Melchert trusts the man who got him out of the Prince’s dungeons!

My favourite part by far was when the party decided to call itself the “Beast Society”. That’s such a perfect name for an evil conspiracy adventurer party, sounds like something straight out of a wuxia story. (They’re an evil conspiracy in a very concrete way: the short term goal of the Beast Society is to look for societally disruptive political secrets in the basements of the Ruined Monastery. The middle-term goal is to depose the local Prince and start an anarchy which, as we all know, is a ladder. Long-term the goal is, of course, Name Level!)

So we had a fun set-up, but it gets better, because we also had a fun adventure: Ruined Monastery does this “the GM should develop a lower level if they feel like it” thing, which I often certainly don’t feel like doing, but in this case the dungeon is so focused on it that you basically have to. So my genius maneuver here was figuring out that God That Crawls, a classic Jim Raggi dungeoneering deconstruction, fits like a nail in the head underneath the Ruined Monastery. Really, you barely need to change anything, particularly when I’d have to change the Anglican church bit anyway to set the adventure in Flanaess. So there’s a life hack for anybody wondering what to put under RM, or how to adapt GTC to a Gygaxian fantasy setting.

Adventurers had earlier mostly cleared out the Ruined Monastery’s first level, so now it was just a matter of finding a way of reaching downstairs. GTC is very much a gimmick dungeon that relies on the party going in and getting stuck, so I was understandably very careful and deliberate about the proceedings. And so were the players, on account of general paranoia about the lower floors. The only party without a care in the world was Master Melchert, who I’m characterizing as a cartoony self-centered egomaniac who cannot possibly imagine anything bad happening to him personally. Melchert of course runs the Beast Society like the Computer runs Alpha Complex: hands off, let the players make all the choices and take all the risks. He’s just there to provide color commentary and leech loot share, and maybe make the occasional lore check.

I am happy to report that while careful, the party ultimately did not account for the possibility that “somebody” might just close the well after them, trapping them inside the “what if the Alien was a Shoggoth?” horror maze. I was particularly delighted when Sipi recognized the adventure after it was too late to back out; I had no idea Sipi knew GTC (really, he seems to read the same adventures I do), but now that the party was in, it didn’t matter. It’s the kind of thing where you’re unlikely to remember anything particularly important if you’ve read it years ago, aside from the gimmick start.

The adventure itself is very good, which is a nice change of pace from the main campaign fork where I’ve been running some pretty dumb things (really, just one dumb thing that keeps recurring) over the last half year. It’s a smart, cleanly-executed conceptual exploration of a different style of dungeon. The titular monster is particularly harsh under my sanity-is-hp scheme; characters may end up taking up to 1d6 stress damage from just seeing the thing, sort of like they were Call of Cthulhu investigators. With the beast looking the way it does, nobody particularly felt like going at it mano-a-mano, of course.

The rest of the session was spent doing the things you do in GTC like mapping, panicking, running, getting lost, finding some treasure, and so on. The party actually lost four henchmen to the monster due to bad luck with ladder logistics, but no PCs have been lost yet. We’ll continue from where we left off next Tuesday, and right now it seems like the God just might get his TPK; the party doesn’t have lot of water or light. Hopefully the players have figured out a solution to the situation over the week.

Whether this ends in tragedy or not, I like the aesthetic twist that GTC implies for the Sunndi campaign as a whole. It’s not all goblins-in-caves! Sometimes it’s Lovecraftian horror in caves, too. And, as I suggested earlier, the genre context gives rise to fresh kinds of challenges, which to me is the entire point of exploring the literary variations D&D can attain: the Gygaxian dungeoneering genre is not really “about” escaping from scary monsters in the way horror is, and therefore something like GTC would be unlikely to exist in a world where all D&D had to be in the dungeoneering genre all the time.

Feature Follow-Up: Consider Gonzo

All right, so back from the actual play reports. A wacky congruence of events occurred earlier this week in that while I was rediscovering my love of Raggian off-genre D&D, as reported above, on the other side of the world Venger Satanis was launching a Kickstarter affair revolving around his own brand of off-genre D&D. Venger’s naturally telling about it to everybody and their aunt, which inspired me to, well, see the non-Gygaxian theme in the week’s events. Let’s go deeper:

When it comes to off-genre D&D, stuff that’s not dungeoneering fantasy, here are the genres that loom prominently for me as successes of the OSR era:
Horror
Historical fantasy
Fairy tale fantasy
Space Opera
Space fantasy/Weird/Gonzo

There are of course other genres that have seen some heat, and I’m sure that I’m missing stuff here because I’m certainly not exhaustively read on what all people are into, so just take that as my current snapshot list: this is what the hobby has impressed me with. I’m almost certain that somebody must have done a legit chanbara D&D thing, for example, and I just don’t know about it. Can’t be reading stuff when there’s so much to play.

But the genre that I wanted to talk about in specific here is that last one, “Gonzo”… I think there’s a specific literary genre here, it just tends to be called with a variety of names, or pass unnamed, which of course leaves one questioning whether it’s a genre at all. Here’s a pet theory:

If you know me to be completely off on this, please do let me know. I feel like I probably don’t know enough about this topic to be certain about my understanding of the historical big picture. Apparently still enough to write a casual overview about it, so it’s up to you to school me as necessary, because we’re apparently in such shadow-grotto of cultural history here that my lord and master, Wikipedia, can’t.

(The name “gonzo” has a complex etymology, googling it will probably get you Hunter S. Thompson. The sense in which the word is used within geek culture is distinct yet probably related to the journalism thing. I’m sure somebody who actually lived through the ’70s in the USA and paid attention could enlighten us on the complex shifts and how the word ended up in this use.)

Putting that genre definition to work, here’s some things that I view as being “gonzo”, or “weird space fantasy” or “trippy fantasy-scifi crossover”, or whatever you want to call it. I’ll try to pick some things that you’ve seen sometime:
Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards is a classic of the genre; called “science fantasy” at Wikipedia, which is often subtly wrong about things. (“Science fantasy” is an older genre of science fiction that has little to do with gonzo. Flash Gordon is science fantasy.)
Heavy Metal (I’m linking the movie, but the comic book of course published a lot of gonzo as well)
Adventure Time, again “science fantasy” at Wikipedia. The dumb fucks probably just call anything with guns + swords “science fantasy”.

OK, so I think by now we know what “gonzo” or “science fantasy” (apparently) is supposed to be. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, if you always get your genre culture delivered neat, with all the tropes in their own little boxes, no touching allowed between the elves and aliens, then I highly recommend gonzoing it up a bit! I enjoy the genre (or anti-genre, or whatever the trend is) consistently throughout the decades of geek culture, gonzo creators are often some of the most thought-provoking. (Makes sense if you buy my pet theory above about what gonzo even is; if gonzo is created by people who love the tropes but hate the soulless codification, then how could it be anything but great?)

And, specifically concerning old school D&D, there’s some fucking great gonzo stuff out there! My two fat favourites are of course Carcosa and Anomalous Subsurface Environment (this one actually calls itself gonzo!), both excellent in their own unique ways. I have never implemented a full D&D campaign with a firm basis in gonzo or space fantasy, but at some point I will, and in the meantime it has a way of coming up.

Also, check this out: I’m a clever cat, so I specifically asked Venger, who obviously follows the scene much more actively than I do, for some recommendations on the gonzo gaming front. This proved a smart move, as he name-drops stuff I haven’t heard of at all. I’ll share:

Troika
The Ultra Violet Grasslands

Both seem intimidatingly beautiful to my ascetic sensibilities. I have to admit to a bit of curiousity about these things Venger considers of interest in the floozy field of gonzo space fantasy, so perhaps I’ll study them at some point.

The Chad business

So anyway, the reason I specifically got to considering gonzo this week is of course that Venger’s all about the gonzo. I got to know his work years ago, Liberation of the Demon Slayer (I think it was his first module?) I think. We’re talking authentic underground outsider art here, no fucks given, recommended reading for experienced old school GMs even if you don’t end up playing the stuff. The early material is very sex-oriented; thought-provoking, and I love how generally legit the material is procedurally as old school D&D while being so thematically challenging.

Venger’s been very productive over the last years, though, and his work has evolved. The new Kickstarter project got me interested in checking out the most recent iteration of his feverish fantasies, Cha’alt. (Published a couple years ago, I understand.) I admit to a spurious interest there, I wanted to see boobies. It was quite the surprise when I hadn’t been following his work! A few basic observations:

It’s a location-heavy campaign setting: I loved the hell out of this presentation emphasis in Anomalous Subsurface Environment, and it’s great here as well. An adventure location — or several — will benefit immensely from a broad-strokes campaign setting embed. Focusing on the big picture and leaving out nitty-gritty setting detailing makes for something that I feel is very usable for a wide variety of purposes. I wouldn’t have any difficulty setting this into a hexcrawl myself, for example, if I wanted to.

It’s gonzo desert space fantasy: Same subgenre as Carcosa, when all’s said and done. Barbarians mixing science and magic, space smugglers visiting the planet, Great Old Ones, and so on. Planetary fantasy, except more gonzo. Flavourful, passionate vision, which is important to a pulp fantasy sensibility of this sort. It’s a very natural genre for D&D, I think. I can’t really remember having seen anything in the field that I wouldn’t have liked, except of course for Spelljammer. If you’re familiar with Carcosa, then this is less restrained and gloomy, but there’s certainly enough serious bits to keep me anchored, too.

Legit execution: Venger has a game-mechanical style that works for me; simple, clean and the to the point. Creative agenda is challenge-oriented with unbiased refereeing, so I have no complaints. The adventure material has heavy tailored encounter emphasis with high risks and high randomness; if you’re familiar with Jim Raggi’s material, the sensibilities are similar. The natural opposite of the “8 orcs, 300 GP” school of dungeon design. The grand centerpiece of Cha’alt is a large funhouse dungeon (“The Black Pyramid”) that literally obviates all “crawling” in the sense of tactical positioning play; just rooms connected into a maze by tubes, each room with a weirder encounter than the last. I am in favour, specifically because I would never write something like this myself.

Clean product: This is a different Venger compared to yesteryear (which is my context here), which I have to admit that I am a bit torn on. On the one hand his old stuff is raw in an interestingly transgressive way, but then again that’s a dead end if you have any mass-market ambitions. Cha’ad has immaculate production values, beautiful maps and rich layouts; a truly premium product. It has hardly any tits or slavery. It’s authentic as gonzo planetary fantasy, entirely more passionate and real than say Dark Sun. (Yeah, I apparently like complaining about how milquetoast TSR products are — talk about hitting a dead horse.)

Basically LotFP: I hope neither creator-publisher minds the comparison, but Jim and Venger have very similar ideals of content and presentation. This new Venger stuff feels very familiar in being in line with the LotFP recipe of being visually gorgeous and genre-experimental. I imagine that their customer bases have a huge overlap.

All in all, good show! I have the habit of incorporating everything useful I read into the campaign chassis, so I guess Cha’alt is now available as a potential dimensional sinkhole in Castle Greyhawk (the place is known for having wacky portals to random subplanes).

I guess I should remember to link the Kickstarter project, too. As I mentioned earlier, Venger’s been asking for visibility, so here you go; I think I have ~15 readers, so that’s sure to be helpful. I should really be the one thanking Venger for giving me the idea for today’s newsletter feature, the topics here kinda-sorta flow together nicely in my head.

Amusingly the new campaign seems to be mainly about selling off the print run of the book that I’ve been reading. (VS has two of these big Cha’alt books at this point, I think, and unless I’m completely mistaken the one I’ve been reading is the first one.) There’s new adventures as well (Venger’s process of setting development seems to be primarily about individual adventure locations), but apparently you can construct a crowdfunding campaign to sink extra inventory, too, if you need to. The story’s pretty heart-warming, even if you wouldn’t wish that sort of pickle for a small press publisher. I hope it’ll work out, the outlay is pretty large on a print run of expensive books like this.

Thursday: Christmassy Lapfantasy

We played, and as usual I shouldn’t tell of the details because this blog is riddled with filthy spies. It seems like we’ll finish next week, though; I imagine I’ll make it the newsletter feature article then, write a bit of an after action report on what we’ve gotten up to.

State of the Productive Facilities

Yeah, by rights I should have finished that essay for the blog this week. No particular reason why I didn’t, except perhaps that the Lapfantasy refereeing can get pretty distracting — and it’s so much more interesting than dumb rpg theory! As always procrastination, dissolute virtual Bohenianism and gambling over imaginary Christmas elf antics carpe the diem.

The Coup gaming is high-quality and inspiring, thankfully, and that’s almost relevant to what I should be working on this quarter. I added a couple of potential issues to the Coup Workbook Partials, in fact. We’ve also been speculating about a new character class that should by rights be a worthwhile addition, but I don’t have a good name for the class yet, so… it’s still pretty early in its development cycle.